A Strong Season for Vaccines

Novartis said today it will pay up to $500 million to license an experimental vaccine to help people quit smoking. The vaccine, from a Swiss biotech company called Cytos, is in clinical trials.

The Cytos vaccine is supposed to prompt the body to create antibodies that bind to nicotine in the blood, reducing nicotine uptake in the brain. Nabi Biopharmaceuticals is also at work on a nicotine vaccine called NicVax.

The Novartis deal is one more sign that vaccines, whose profile in the industry was declining until recently, are making a comeback. A few factors had encouraged drug makers to seek greener pastures. Vaccines can be hard to make — they have more in common with complex biotech drugs than with the relatively simple small-molecule drugs that are Big Pharma’s mainstay. And patients don’t buy them for years on end, as they do with drugs for chronic problems like diabetes or high cholesterol.

But in the past few years, promising new vaccines used to treat (rather than prevent) diseases, the threat of a bird flu pandemic and high-profile problems with seasonal flu vaccine supply have brought new attention to the field. Some vaccines such as Wyeth’s Prevnar against meningitis command premium prices, too.

Last year, Novartis bet on vaccines when it bought Chiron, a big player in the flu-vaccine world. And in the past month alone:

AstraZeneca paid more than $15 billion for MedImmune, maker of an inhaled flu vaccine.

Merck announced that it sold $365 million worth of Gardasil, its vaccine to reduce the risk of contracting the virus that causes cervical cancer, in the first quarter.

The FDA approved the first vaccine for bird flu, which the U.S. government has agreed to buy from the manufacturer, Sanofi-Aventis

An FDA committee recommended approval of Provenge, a vaccine from Dendreon to treat advanced prostate cancer.

Still, some of the pitfalls of the vaccine business persist. Dow Jones’s Peter Loftus reports this afternoon that a manufacturing glitch means there could be a coming shortage of Merck’s ProQuad, a vaccine that protects against measles, mumps, rubella and chicken pox. Public health officials say other vaccines can make up for any shortages.